“I joined Vodafone from Cisco, really to manage the transformation to internet protocol (IP), and I remember meeting my colleagues at Vodafone and saying ‘guys, the future is all IP’ and being laughed at,” says Jorge Fernandes, UK CTO at Vodafone, as he reflects on 15 years at the mobile operator.

Steeped in both computing and networking, Fernandes started his career working with mainframes before moving to Cisco as an IBM specialist in the late 1990s.

Fernandes joined Vodafone in 2002 and has moved around the company since then, spending time in its engineering and operation functions, as well as serving as CTO in Portugal and Turkey prior to taking up the UK post in 2015.